Mistress of the maestro of Maranello

What Fiamma Breschi liked best about Enzo Ferrari, apart from the hundreds of letters he wrote, in his famous violet ink, professing his love for her, was his absolute dedication to the job of building the racing cars that bore his name. "He was a constant presence at the factory," she remembers. "He would be there on Saturdays and Sundays, over Easter and Christmas. He never betrayed his cars. Other things, perhaps . . ."

Plenty of people knew Enzo Ferrari from one perspective or another, some of them less than entirely flattering, but few saw him from as many angles as Signora Breschi. At first she was the young mistress of one of his top drivers, Luigi Musso. After Musso's death, in the 1958 French grand prix, she became one of Ferrari's own women. And finally, until Ferrari himself died in 1988, she acted as his spy, one of a network of people whose intelligence-gathering allowed him to control the little empire that became the most powerful legend in motor racing.

Next Monday morning, several hundred people will be drawn by that legend to the Ferrari factory at Maranello, where they will witness the unveiling of the F2004, the car intended to carry Michael Schumacher to his seventh world championship. Enzo Ferrari was the first constructor to make the launch of his new car an annual event; still the faithful flock to pay homage to the legacy of an enigmatic figure who so hated leaving his home town that he persuaded the world to come to him.

Musso, a handsome young Roman, was one of the drivers whose deaths long ago helped create the Ferrari myth. Others included Peter Collins, Count Wolfgang von Trips, Lorenzo Bandini, Gilles Villeneuve and the Marquis de Portago, whose crash in the 1957 Mille Miglia sports car race took a group of spectators with him and created a scandal that almost put an end to the whole of motor racing.

From being the most hazardous sport on earth, formula one has become one of the safest: only one driver, Ayrton Senna, has been killed in a grand prix in the past 20 years. But the memory of those young men falling like autumn leaves remains to give the sport its enduring image of dark glamour, with Ferrari at the centre.

Fiamma Breschi, a native of Florence, was still a star-struck teenager when she met Musso in 1952. Within a short time he had left his wife and two children, and she was with him when he died at the Rheims circuit, dicing with his team-mate Mike Hawthorn. Now, at 69, living in her apartment near the centre of Florence, with Musso's yellow helmet among her souvenirs, she is among those heard in a television documentary titled The Secret Life of Enzo Ferrari, to be shown tonight.

She remembers the feud between Musso and his two English team-mates, Collins and Hawthorn. "The Englishmen had an agreement," she says. "Whichever of them won, they would share the winnings equally. It was the two of them against Luigi, who was not part of the agreement. Strength comes in numbers, and they were united against him. This antagonism was actually favourable rather than damaging to Ferrari. The faster the drivers went, the more likely it was that a Ferrari would win."

If Ferrari knew about the pact between the Englishmen, he would have relished the intrigue. "Cunning and intelligence were his greatest strengths," Breschi says. "He was incredibly good at choosing the people he worked with - the drivers, the engineers, the rest of the team. And then he would set them off against each other. He would indicate where a problem was, and the engineer who had designed the car would defend himself while the oth ers attacked him. From their discussion, Ferrari would work out the solution. And 99% of the time he was right."

There would often be rumours that one driver was being given better equipment. "They used to say that all the cars were prepared in the same way, and perhaps that was true, but as with cakes, there are those that rise more and those that rise less, and the cake that rises more tends to be given to the most greedy, to the driver who is already ahead. And Fangio, for example, was extremely greedy."

Musso was in debt when he died, and the money for winning the French grand prix, traditionally the biggest prize of the season, was important to him. Running wide on a flat-out curve, his car somersaulted into a field. When Breschi saw him in hospital, and felt him respond as she stroked his hand, she was told that there was hope. Later, back in their hotel room, the team manager arrived to tell her he was dead.

"I ran for the window, which was open because it was July and very hot. I tried to throw myself out. I was already halfway out when Beba, Fangio's girlfriend, and Lulu Trintignant, Maurice's wife, grabbed me and pulled me back. They didn't leave me alone that night or the next day."

By the end of that year Collins and Hawthorn were also dead, and Breschi could not suppress a feeling of release. "I had hated them both," she said, "first because I was aware of certain facts that were not right, and also because when I came out of the hospital and went back to the hotel, I found them in the square outside the hotel, laughing and playing a game of football with an empty beer-can. So when they died, too, it was liberating for me. Otherwise I would have had unpleasant feelings towards them for ever. This way I could find a sense of peace."

But not for long. A few months later she was in Rome, trying to forget her tragedy, when she received the first letter from Ferrari. "He said I would always have friends at Maranello and that I could go back whenever I wanted. So when I recovered, I went to see him."

Ferrari turned out to have two or three other things on his mind. First, he asked her for a woman's opinion on his road cars. "He had found that a number of women were jealous of their husbands' Ferraris. He thought it would be better if they started to like their husbands' cars. I reported all the faults that might annoy a passenger. All sorts of things. I managed to improve Ferrari cars despite not being an engineer."

He also started to send her to the races, using her as an extra pair of eyes and ears. "I always had to know what was going on. Then I'd go back to Modena and report it to him in person. Sometimes he got contradictory reports and he'd say, 'Should I believe you or them?'"

Gradually he revealed his deeper intentions. "He started to desire me. At first he hinted at it, and later he made it very clear. It started with letters and then moved to telephone conversations which lasted up to two hours. He would call me when the engineers went to lunch, after they went home, any time he had a minute to spare. He told me that he couldn't imagine his life without me. I refused him, but he kept writing to me about a passion that he said was literally consuming him. This lasted for years."

Ferrari already had a wife, Laura, and a long-term mistress, Lina Lardi. The volatile Laura had given him a son, Dino, a promising engineer whose death from muscular dystrophy in 1956, at the age of 24, sent Ferrari into a period of somewhat operatic mourning. By the gentle, undemanding Lina he had a second son, Piero, who was not permitted to carry the family name until Laura's death in 1978, when he was already 33. Having spent decades in social obscurity, Lina now lives, along with Piero and his family, in the big dark house in Modena where Enzo and Laura made their home.

"According to his letters," Breschi says, "I was the first woman of his life. His relationship with his wife was very odd. She was very funny when she was young, but after their son's death they became estranged. He saw her as a burden. With the other one, he always said it was an accident. Signora Lina never made his life difficult. When she was unhappy, she would go shopping in Modena. Her other hobby was knitting, and with that she managed to be content. We are all different. My hobby was driving a Ferrari."

Ferrari takes its toll:

Alberto Ascari

Ferrari's world champion of 1952 and 1953 was killed trying a friend's car during an informal test session at Monza in 1955, aged 36. Tens of thousands attended his funeral.

Eugenio Castellotti

The most promising Italian of the generation after Ascari died while testing at Modena in 1957, aged 26. Ferrari had telephoned the night before, summoning him to the session.